Mahler's Second, Seoul Arts Center

While Christine and I were in BC this summer for a vacation from our vacation, I received an email from our friend Zee back in Seoul alerting me to some upcoming Mahler performances there. She wanted to know if she could buy some tickets for us before the concerts were sold out (we had been skunked a few months earlier). Now that's a good friend. She knew the focal point of our Sydney visit in February had been an (incredible) performance of Mahler's Eighth, and that I had a history of travelling within North America for noteworthy Mahler performances, and spending everything I could scrape together to hear the LSO or LPO play Mahler while I was living in London years ago. From time to time I've made a habit of scanning the web for upcoming concerts, but tend to curtail this trolling-for-Mahler activity when finances prevent any follow-up action.


"Why Mahler?", someone once asked me at a dinner party. I couldn't answer him - it seemed like such a ridiculous question. Does anyone consciously, methodically weigh art forms and their practitioners to select a tidy handful of personal favourites? I first heard Mahler's music when I was a sixteen-year-old rock drummer with an avid thirst for Led Zeppelin, Foghat and Deep Purple. The combined senior student and faculty orchestra at the Courtenay Youth Music Centre was preparing to perform the Third for the summer's final concert, and I was responsible for the cymbal part - an appropriate assignment. At the first rehearsal, as soon as the idiosyncratic first movement began to erupt and unravel around me, I felt the floor beneath my feet completely disappear. There was no decision-making process. This music that was elevating and suspending me couldn't have reached me on a more personal, emotional, instinctive level if the hundred musicians around me were playing my DNA. In Mahler's emotional intensity, unapologetic sentimentality, temporal complexity, and fearlessly episodic storytelling, I recognized a voice my spirit needed to hear, and always would. 

This 2010-2011 concert season is a big one for Mahler performances. This year marks the 150th anniversary of Mahler's birth, and next year is the centennial of his death. There are probably Mahler cycles being performed all over the world, but I haven't brought myself to check for them during these somewhat lean times. Thankfully, Zee caught wind of the four symphonies the Seoul Philharmonic are performing this fall, and bought me a pair of tickets for all four: the Second, Tenth, First and Third. In total, the eight tickets cost less than what I've paid for a single seat in New York.

The performance of the Second Symphony was the first event Christine and I had attended at the Seoul Arts Center, an impressive 1990s-era facility with multiple venues and an opulent mall-like unifying plaza. We didn't get much of a chance to take it all in because we were rushing (as usual) to get to the concert in time. We had taken the subway's Line 2 for about 15 stops, then waited a few minutes for a bus, which we accidentally climbed off one stop too early.

The interior of the concert hall was substantial, but not enormous.  It had the vertical feel of Carnegie Hall, with the uppermost seats looking more down on the stage than across miles of heads towards it. The rows of very comfy seats were stacked fairly steeply, so the sightlines and sense of privacy were exceptional. We sat up in the gods, but it felt like the dress circle, with the deep stage almost as tall from our vantage as it was wide. The fan-shaped hall was finished entirely in dulled mahogany, except for the stage, which glowed with incandescent-lit maple.  In the audience, one felt like a small child sitting on the living room carpet facing an enormous, expensive 1950s-vintage British hi-fi speaker. From the sounds of the musicians warming up (thankfully devoid of dashed-off snippets from the piece we were about to hear), it was clear that the hall's sound was full and lively. It was going to get loud in there, and the room was going to let it. Hot damn.


There was lots to appreciate even while waiting for the concert to begin. For one, the orchestra was suitably enormous, and included twelve basses, sixteen cellos, sixteen violas, two tam-tams, and a pair of large church bells (a requirement of the Second I'd never seen filled before). Unexpectedly, the violas were seated downstage left, and the cellos were upstage of them, which allowed the cellos' soundboards to face the audience to an unusual extent. The seating plan had obviously been chosen for sonic reasons - a very good sign. Both timpanists had a huge number of different mallet types at the ready, and there were three sets of crash cymbals, as well as two pair of suspended cymbals. When the choir entered, they did so in an almost disarmingly orderly fashion, filling the width of the three rows of seats behind the stage like two viscous fluids: black for the men, white for the women. Koreans don't range in size like North Americans do, so the effect was beautifully uniform, like the keys on a piano.

Like many Asian languages, Korean has an important pitch component that goes beyond simple inflection as we native English speakers know it. Someone recently explained to me that this characteristic may be responsible for the remarkable intonation one hears in Asian musicians and singers, both amateur and professional. And Koreans love to sing, unashamedly doing so at any fun gathering. Maybe the predominantly-Asian makeup of the orchestra had some bearing on the following. Whatever the reason, the complete absence of intonation problems in the Seoul Philharmonic was truly stunning. I'm not at all hypersensitive to intonation (I'm a drummer, after all), but it's unmistakingly elevating when all intonation is unexpectedly perfect. The orchestra was equally adept at dynamics, in both solo and ensemble work. All soloists were absolutely superb and wonderfully expressive. I've never heard such a tight, sonorous trombone section in my life. If the SPO had a flaw (and this is getting very nit-picky), it's that its rhythms sometimes lacked a degree of fierceness in precision, so dotted rhythms would sometimes be just a bit jaunty. That said, the lively hall might have something to do with it. Besides, I honestly don't think I could've handled the orchestra being any better than they were. Mahler would've loved the Seoul Philharmonic.

I don't have a score with me and don't know it well enough to give a detailed account of the interpretation, but it was clearly chock full of sensitive mindfulness and intent. There's a section in the first movement just before the return to the movement's opening figure, where the fortissimo timps and brasses are playing a parallel triplet figure in sort of an anguished close-up of a fanfare. This was executed more slowly than usual, with the triplets and dotted figures given their full emotional weight. The emotional impact was staggering: it was like hearing the whole first movement with new ears. And the tumbling descent into the movement's final pizzicato notes was pulled off without a shred of buffoonery, with the spacing and dynamics of those three crucial final notes to perfectly set up the somber, funereal moment-of -silence that followed.

The second movement was played beautifully wistfully, without a hint of cynicism. The timpanist was allowed to begin the third movement without first receiving a tempo from the conductor - an idea that really strengthened the transition. That movement had the spooky swirliness of the Seventh Symphony's two nachtmusik movements. The fourth movement retained both the character of the original orchestral song, and that non-cadential interlude feeling that contributes to a sense of anticipation. Maybe that's how it sounded because I knew what was coming, but that's human nature for you. What came, by the way, was head-shakingly stunning and transcendental. Invisible fanfares hinted from every direction, graves opened, corpses marched, and all creatures discovered eternal, luminous life, utterly free of judgement. It was Mahler's vision and music delivered completely intact by a roomful of dedicated spirits, in an exceptional hall where no one coughed or dropped their programs. Countless curtain calls, an eventual (and equally stirring) encore performance of the finale's closing episode, and the most heartfelt and deserved shouts of "bravo" that I've ever heard. Two days later, I'm still shaking. I may yet look around to see what they're doing in New York, Philadelphia, London, Prague, and Vienna, but I now know that I'm a one-dollar subway ride away from my next world-class Mahler fix.


The subway was jammed on our way home. It's apparently been years since Seoul Metro employed people to physically stuff passengers onto the trains, but the effect would've been the same. Things eventually eased as we closer to our home stop, and we actually had a railing to lean against. It was only after we stepped off the train that I noticed my wallet was gone from my pocket. I rarely carry more than the tiniest amount of cash (to avoid spending it on forgettable things), but this time I had had the equivalent of about $60 on me, as Christine and I had just been paid for a one-off voicing job and had hoped to use our winnings to finally reimburse Zee for all the concert tickets. After fruitlessly checking all my pockets and Christine's purse on the platform, we went upstairs and found the station's security office, where we reported the sad loss in our scrappy pidgin. I didn't care too much about my Canadian driver's licence or bank card: they weren't really relevant or valuable to me (or anyone) here in Korea. But the loss of the cash, small as it might seem, was quite a setback for us. The security officers gave us the contact information for the relevant lost & found office, showed us a remarkable feature on their website where one can see uploaded photos of turned-in items (a system that would be too prone to abuse to ever be implemented in North America), and took my phone number.

The next day, I unsuccessfully tried to scan the Seoul Metro's recent lost & found items online, then took the subway six stops to City Hall station where the indicated office was. A lone cheerful ajumma was manning the counter at the lost & found, which contained a large tidy collection of briefcases and shopping bags on compartmentalized shelves. This was no great surprise, as locals typically toss anything they're carrying onto the convenient open shelves above the subway seats, where the itemscould easily be (and obviously were) subsequently forgotten. I had looked up the Korean word for "wallet" in my guidebook ("chigap"), and offered it to the woman, while making cartoon pantomime gestures suggesting loss. "Name?", she said. "Robert Robson" I offered in deliberate handling of the tongue-twisting laterals. She smiled and showed me the brown wallet - mine! - that had already been sitting in her hand. I couldn't believe it. "Where from?" she asked."Ca-na-da. Ban-cou-ber." I offered, observing the Korean pronunciation. "How much?" She was testing me to see if I knew how much money was in the wallet. "Chil-man-on?" I stumbled through my clumsy attempt at saying seventy-thousand won (about $63). She shook her head, and I was momentarily crestfallen that the much-needed cash was apparently gone. "Yuk-man, chil chun-on" she said, handing me the wallet, having indicated that there was in fact only sixty-seven thousand won in it. She wasn't being playful - counting money accurately is serious business here. I was flabbergasted. Someone had found and turned in my wallet without helping themselves at all to its liquid, untraceable contents. Stories like this one are apparently common in Korea, where a penchant for petty crime just isn't part of the cultural makeup. Chalk one up for human nature, the eye-opening benefits of world travel - and the incomparable people of Korea.                  

Percy Norman Pool

Even vagabonds have hometowns, and Vancouver will always be mine, even if its weather permanently precludes my living there year-round. This year, the BC summer weather seemed hit its stride in mid-July when Christine and I were well into our campaign to spend time with everyone in our immediate family. It was during our stay with my sister Jenny and her hubby Martin in South Vancouver ("Camgara" to the initiated) that we decided to meet up for a swim at Percy Norman Memorial Pool near 30th and Ontario.

I knew it was going to be more a nostalgic experience than a recreational swim. I had learned to swim at Percy Norman, which opened the year I was born. The pool had been part of my compact childhood universe: we lived just a short drive away at 459 West 20th, and dad called the Mounties games from a tiny booth on top of what was then Capilano Stadium, just across the street from the pool. Edith Cavell Elementary was a block from our house.  Everything else might as well have been on Venus.  Our family seemed to go to the pool every second Sunday (and out to my grandparents' farm in Haney on alternate Sundays).

The pool building's foyer housed a fascinating (to me) piece of 1960s exotica (especially for a characteristically austere 1960s civic property): a simulated undersea garden to add interest to the otherwise unusable area under the open staircase that led to the bleachers. It was always the first thing my six-year-old self looked for.  

Back then, the person at the foyer's small ticket counter would issue each of us a square clothing bag made of stiff green mesh. Diagrams on the wall would show how to use the clothing bags to accommodate a suit or sports jacket (when did North Americans stop dressing up, and why?).  Mike, dad and I would head into their changing room on the left, and the three girls would head to theirs on the right.  Occasionally, before I was old enough to look after myself, my mom would bring me into the women's changing area, probably because my dad was away on a road trip with the baseball team. I remember being slightly miffed to discover that the girls got to change in private booths, while I usually had to change in an open room filled with strange hairy men. (And don't get me started on the trough-style communal urinals that you still find in older buildings.) Privacy aside, the sixties were all about cleanliness, so as we exited the changing rooms for the pool we would all wade through a shallow tiled trough filled with a disinfectant solution of likely now-illegal intensity.

The pool hadn't changed much, but was in surprsingly good shape for a fifty-year-old facility just a few days away from permanent closure. The brown tiles around the pool edges and colourful tilework on the deck surface surrounding the swimming and diving pools showed no signs of wear at all. Stephani remembered that she used to scan the randomly-laid tiles for the little yellow circular ones. I recall having been more interested in the warnings "DEEP" and NO RUNNING" incorporated into the tile design, partly because "DEEP" was (and is) "peed" backwards: appropriate nomenclature for a family facility. Since my last visit over thirty years before, a hot tub and sauna wing had been added to the side of the building that had once looked out through tall, narrow windows towards the grass of Riley Park. Unsurprisingly, everything in the facility seemed smaller than I remembered, to the extent that I could barely negotiate the stairs leading up to the bleachers, my feet having mapped them decades before when Mike and I would tear around the building's little-used upper regions after hastily changing post-swim. Walking on the pool deck, I could still picture my first swimming teacher, a limping older man who looked like the guy in jail on the Monopoly board, coaxing we shivering tots into the pool one by one, as he drew us along the edge of the pool with a long T-handled pole as he walked along the pool edge. I'm very grateful my parents put us all through swimming lessons: the lifetime of confidence around water was worth the short-lived trauma.

I was glad to see there were still vending machines in the building's foyer. Our family swims of old were often capped off with a seemingly decadent treat: dad would buy the family a ten-cent chocolate bar from the machine, and we would all share it. This sounds like a time-distotred, Depression-era tale, but it's true. Our favourite was "Liquid Four Flavours", an easily-divided 4x2 matrix comprised of two squares each of vanilla, chocolate, caramel, and "bordeaux" liquid fillings. The exotic-sounding "bordeaux" - a sweet amber filling tasting like dolce di leche - was my personal fave. It was a good day when I got to eat a square of that. 

When things were a bit more flush, the family would sometimes stop on the way home at the White Spot drive-in at Cambie and King Edward for an in-car lunch (a treat to be relived while there are still a few remaining White Spot drive-ins). The long, narrow trays spanning the inside of the car; ketchup, vinegar, salt and pepper in glass containers; genuine cutlery; the smell of dill pickles and triple-O sauce - these all contributed to the illusion that the family car had been transformed into a private restaurant - one where you were allowed to blowgun the paper sleeve off your milkshake straw at high velocity towards a family member.

Getting back to 2010, the five of us had a good swim in the near-vacant slow lane, doing gentle laps, stopping to chat, climbing into the "new" hot tub, and comparing notes about what had survived. After changing, I just had to head upstairs one last time to look at the nether regions Mike and I used to explore. Every public building I knew from that early time in my life - schools, community centers, libraries, public health offices, and Percy Norman Pool - evoked the same unfussy functionality and optimistic, non-sponsored, public-oriented zeitgeist our society has sadly lost. Everything in that naive world seemed to function on a silent understanding that may no longer be possible, but function they did. In any event, Percy Norman Pool's upper reaches were simple with painted concrete, glass blocks, metal handrails, rubber stair treads, and unpretentious light fixtures. Still flawless in their final hours of purpose, they reminded me of my 1952 Chevrolet, whose faithful stoicism won't allow me to let him go.

Christine bought us all a Snickers bar to share as we made our way down Ontario Street to Jenny and Martin's house. Houses of all eras line that route, every numbered avenue shaded by a different species of boulevard tree. We spent the rest of the evening enjoying a gourmet alfresco dinner in the gazebo, and singing every song we three Robsons could remember from K-Tel's 22 Explosive Hits Vol.2. Years from now, when my shrinking bones are folded into some rocking chair, memories of that day will bubble up, and I'll know I've led a wonderful life.

The new Percy Norman Pool has opened in the flashy new curling facility they built for the Winter Olympics. Martin says it has an enormous hot tub and an artificial stream running through the facility. Christine and I will have to try it out when we're back in Canada, which could be next summer or the one after that.

          

"heaven spanky long emmerica"

that's "Hello Stranger" to you

One could put together a splendid coffee table book from t-shirt sayings regularly encountered on the street in Seoul.  Christine (Grace) just spotted "heaven spanky long emmerica" at a subway station.  Sometimes I get the camera deployed in time to capture these gems, but they are often fleeting dream-like encounters. Last night on the subway I spotted a guy in a baseball hat with an embrodered facsimile of a Michigan temporary vehicle permit.  You just never know.

This week's theme seems to be visual entertainment.  The Seoul Fringe Festival is going on, but (he sheepishly admits) we haven't made it out to any of it's events yet, despite living in Hongdae, the hub of the Fringe scene.  I know, I know.  I can legitimately cite an increasingly crazy schedule.  Really!

 

There was an entire Thai film crew staying at our guest house through the spring, a fact that was hard to ignore.  Their shooting schedule was intense, so they'd return in the wee hours and wind down on the deck with beer (immense bottles of Cass or Hite) and cigarettes from the Family Mart down the street, augmented with spicy dried Thai snacks from a big care package one of their mothers had sent them.  We had the good sense to join them the few times we could stay up that late.

The working title for the romantic comedy they were shooting was "Knowing Me, Knowing You", but it's opening in Thailand this week as "Hello Stranger", presumably because ABBA wanted too much loot.  Don't Benny and Bjorn have anough helicopters and white jumpsuits already?  Anyway, I had a small walk-on in an early scene, where I'm a backpacker trying to extract my shoes from under the main character, who is sleeping off his binge in a hostel's front doorway.  Because my own shoes wound up in the shot, I had to go home afterwards in my sandals in the rain so they could keep my shoes around for continuity.  My scintillating performance wasn't quite enough to earn me an invitation to the premiere (let alone the spiffy little motorcycle they bought for the film), although they did give me about 40,000 won and a very nice box lunch at the time.  There's a trailer on Youtube as of this writing - it looks like a nice fun rom-com.  We hope it does well, as the cast and crew were great people - tons of fun.

The two of us will hopefully get some good screen time in the horror film we were involved in this week.  Our friend Maggie had told us last weekend that she'd just been a demon in a film, and was doing also sound for the production.  She texted us a couple of days ago as we were just heading out for a Fringe event (no - really!) asking if we wanted to be demons.  Having a family policy never to antagonize the undead, we agreed and climbed on the subway for the lengthy journey across Seoul to Gangdong station.

Our elaborate makeup was applied in a tiny, barely-furnished apartment by a small group of volunteers, over the course of about two hours.  From what we gathered, the main character had been killing off a couple of demons a night, so the makeup people were getting quite adept at applying the latex, scars, long pointy fingers, and blood.  We also learned early that WE WERE NOT ZOMBIES, who apparently occupy a decidedly lower tier in the hierarchy.

The blood, by the way, was a mixture of corn syrup, Nestles Quik, and red food coloring.  It had a stunningly realistic half-coagulated appearance, and didn't taste too bad either.  This was for the best, as we spent the next few hours having the stuff spooned into our mouths in staggering quantities.  As demons, we had to adopt finger- and neck-intensive animalistic movements, and chase two Korean women down the darkened alleys of Gangdong.  Christine killed one of them, and the other one gouged my eyes out.  All in a night's work.  Actually, all the chasing and scuffling got everyone's adrenaline going, so there were quite a few scrapes and bruises.  My eyeballs still ache.

Apart from the unparallelled experience of delighting Seoul's healthy insect population by lying on the ground for extended periods covered with corn syrup and chocolate, the highlight of the non-zombie-movie shoot had to have been the director's screaming fit when a huge cockroach started to fly towards him.  He almost dropped the camera, which was running at the time.  Of all the scenes shot that night, the unplanned roach attack earned the most replays when we were reviewing the evening's footage at 3am.

Last item on the screen theme: Christine/Grace and I just got involved in re-voicing a Korean cartoon called "Chipa the Robot".  Animation gigs of this type can be a bit challenging, as you have to read the script while watching the screen and trying to make the English words match the Korean mouth movements.  I have vague childhood recollections of watching what must have been re-voiced cartoons from distant countries, usually when I was home from school with a cold.  The fever, the truly bizarre cartoons, and the alcohol-enriched red cough syrup we used to get all swirl together in a muddled hybrid image, complete with unfamiliar characters crying, sweating, burping and farting at random intervals through inexplicable plots.  It wasn't a dream.  At least one more generation of North American children is likely to share this kind of experience, and I'm glad to be a part of the weirdness.      

the Hello Stranger crew doing what crews do
 

always ready to Thai one on

becoming demonized

Vacations within vacations.

It's been said that time prevents everything from happening at once, and it appears to be true. Those enslaved by time might be inclined to point out that a year has passed since this blog's last entry. Piffle, I say. We're still here, we're still there, "then" is the new "now". It's all a question of perspective. In short, I'm granting myself carte blanche to shake off the shackles of strict chronology, and write about whichever "when" suits me at a given time (or non-time).

There will (hopefully) be future posts to expand upon the following, but, in a nutshell, we've been to China, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand during the intervening months. More interestingly, we've taken a summer vacation from our spastic around-the-world junket in order to visit family in New York, B.C. and Alberta. We had some time-consuming chores to execute while there, and have returned to tropical weather and a fairly open schedule in Seoul, so it's hard to say what is vacation and what is simply life. It's a surprisingly satisfying problem to have.

It has taken very little time for Seoul to feel like home again. We were welcomed with open arms to our old spot at the Hongsi Guest House, and even greeted like long-lost friends at our neighbourhood grocery store. Getting around in this immense city has been second nature, which may not seem too surprising after only a two-month departure, but Seoul might as well be on a different planet. Some of the attached photos may hint at this.

One thing that takes some getting used to here is the constant jumble of comings-and-goings in the expat community. At home, months or even years may go by between visits with a particular friend, but you always expect to find them where you left them, more or less. Not here. Our circle of friends and colleagues is constantly in flux; a situation that will hopefully remind us to enjoy our friends while we can. Brenda, whose advice got us to Seoul in the first place, has been back in Vancouver for months now, leaving quite a hole. Several of the voice actors have left or are planning to leave in the coming months. Thankfully, none of the bands I've been playing for (The Pines, Short Bus, Voodoo Children and L.R.D.) have been perforated by departures, although the heat and vacation season have put them in limbo for now.

Our reacclimatization to Seoul is behind us, the jobs are slowly beginning to come in again, and we've fallen into a healthy new routine. Courtesy of jetlag, we now get up at 6am, stomp to a park to wreak havoc on the public exercise equipment (to the amusement of the alarmingly-fit geriatrics we see there), head home, shower and eat an outdoor breakfast, all before our former wake-up time. A tip for the chronically draggy: change your sleep pattern. When you find your magic numbers, you'll feel like a new person. I myself am over seven feet tall now, and have won the Nobel prize in medicine.

Fandango Junket - Korea Change

Our planned six-month stopover in Seoul is obviously more than just another destination on our globe-o-rama. We’re here to spend time with our buddy Brenda, to get under the skin of a (very) different culture, and live inexpensively while I attempt to actually finish a design project that has gone heavily into overtime. So what else are we doing here? Voice acting, of course! Westerners (a.k.a. foreigners) living here are constantly telling us how surreal life in Korea can be, but nothing can match the world of voice acting for genuine weirdness.

As I’ve mentioned, Korea is not a big tourist destination. We foreigners are rare enough in most parts of Seoul that we still do a double-take when we see another white person. And virtually all the westerners are here to teach English. The “jobs” listings on Craigslist Korea contain little more than endless teaching positions. Despite the demand, most teaching positions are not particularly cushy, and the people who take them seem to become quite drained over time. That said, most teachers stay on in Korea much longer than they originally planned, enjoying a higher standard of living than the same work would net them at home.

All this demand for English education creates a spillover demand for teaching materials and kids’ TV shows in English. Brenda got involved in the voice acting world here several years ago while visiting her sister Lisette, and who was doing a kids’ show at the time. Brenda was introduced to the Lisette’s agent (“Harry Lim”, believe it or not), and soon joined the few dozen North American-born voice actors regularly scrambling between studios all over Seoul to read children’s stories, sing spelling songs, and do whatever else gets thrown in front of them. Brenda had told us that the work was plentiful, lucrative, and not especially challenging – an alluring combination – so we joined Harry Lim’s roster soon after arriving and waited for the phone to ring.

A side note: because our names are both a bit of a mouthful for Koreans, we decided (over a late-night dinner with Brenda and her friend Chris) to adopt new names for ourselves, purely for our voiceover work. Chris was quite adamant that we become Don Johnson and Grace Jones, so we did. Delighted with his handiwork, Chris began introducing us to everyone as Don and Grace Johnson (because we’re married), and it stuck to the extent that we now habitually call each other Don and Grace, even when we’re alone.

My first voicing job was to sing the tag line to a cell phone company’s jingle in a variety of character voices. Never having done anything of the sort before, in a roomful of people who didn’t speak English, and after just having climbed five flights of stairs in communal slippers I kept falling out of, all added a decidedly surreal je-ne-sais-quoi to the proceedings. In our society, a session like this would likely be capped off with the requisite exchange of thanks and compliments, whether or not they were sincere or warranted. Not here. It’s up to you to decide whether you sucked, and to learn to get by without the forced niceties. It’s actually very refreshing, once you get used to it.

The way the voicing jobs come to us is like Charlie’s Angels-meets-Mission Impossible with some Hello Kitty sprinkled in for good measure. One of us will get a voice call or text message (day or night) that goes something like this: “Tues 10am Hapjeong Station Exit 4. Call 011 1562 3121.” So you scour the subway map for the specified station, figure out how to get there, take the train, find the exit, and dial the number. Someone answers in Korean. I say “Don Johnson, exit four”, and they hang up. A few minutes elapse before someone will walk up to me (as the only white guy in sight, I’m easy to spot), or a car honks and its passenger door flings open. While I’m being escorted to some nearby studio (which may be under a restaurant, above a café or buried in an office building), I’m usually asked only if I speak Korean. I try to reply, but probably say something along the lines of “Mongoose travesty. We are pimples”. The conversation pretty much ends there.

Keep in mind that the jobs we’re summoned to cover a wide range of requirements, and we receive no advance warnings. You could be handed a fistful of scripts and ushered into a studio where several of your colleagues are already seated, trying to decide who will be papa dragon, who will be the three flowers, and who will be the mystical stoat. Or, you could be led down a narrow staircase, plopped down at a makeup table, and worked on by several people for half an hour, all wordlessly, and all without any significant clues as to what will follow. In one case, what followed was the assisted donning of a colourful traditional Korean villager costume, my being led onto a full video set to read some hastily memorized lines for the cameras and a largish number of people, then being led back to the makeup table to have the entire process repeated three times. This might’ve been less unsettling if I’d actually had any sort of prior on-camera acting experience, whether or not I was wearing a fake beard and a yellow tent at the time. It was more like being abducted off the street by mute Disneyland employees and being forced to work for them for a few hours. It covered about half our July rent.

Perhaps Harry Lim was trying to empirically determine my forte, but I was initially sent to a bewildering assortment of jobs requiring singing, acting, reading, chanting, and puppeteering, among other things. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the calls for my services fell off noticeably after a couple of weeks. Fortunately, Christine (I mean Grace) has found fairly steady voicing work, most of which has made use of her uncanny knack for doing fantastic kids’ voices. She’s also had her fair share of the less conventional gigs, having provided some splendid acting footage for video game animators to work from, and chairing an English skills assessment interview panel for a multi-billion-dollar construction company. But the mystery calls have recently picked up for both of us, and we anticipate finding ourselves in even more unimaginable situations before our time here is through.

Korea - first impressions

After stowing our luggage below, the airport shuttle bus driver climbed aboard, turned and gave a quick, heel-snapping militaristic bow to the two of us (and thirty empty seats), and we were on our way into Seoul. Still groggy from the overnight flight, I don’t remember much from the 40 minute bus journey: rain, low cloud, flat green terrain with a few large buildings soon giving way to hilly green terrain with very many not-so-large buildings. That’s about it.

Brenda, our friend and seasoned Seoul-mate (I couldn’t resist), came to greet us at the Hyatt and introduce us to Anna, whose apartment we would be sharing for the next three weeks. Between the jetlag, the rain, and the fact that both Anna and Brenda had to hustle back to their respective jobs, the transfer from bus to hugs to car to apartment seemed to take about ninety seconds. Anna’s camo US Army uniform (she’s a sergeant) added a surreal twist to the sudden haste. Once inside the spacious modern 10th-floor view apartment, we were enthusiastically bombarded by four tiny dogs, two of which were pure white but had their ears and tails dyed in neon colours. Anna told us as she was rushing out the door that two of the dogs didn’t go outside (the white ones), but the other two (miniature Dobermans) did, and in fact needed to right away. So having had maybe five or six coherent thoughts between us in the previous ten hours, and desperately craving sleep, we found ourselves being dragged down some narrow Korean streets by two energetic dogs, not entirely sure how to get back to the building, how to get into it when we did, and what to do with the poo.

So what’s Korea like?

The first thing we noticed was that pedestrians, cars, motorcycles, trucks, scooters and baby strollers all share the same pavement, and - it works. We had to quickly learn to operate the retractable leashes so as not to permanently lose our new charges under the vegetable trucks and pizza delivery scooters that often came within inches of us. There are sidewalks here and there, but they are commonly used for overflow parking and scooter passing lanes. You’d expect to see dents, crutches and road rage everywhere, but it all moves along just fine, as long as no one loses their nerve - which no one ever does. Thankfully, it takes very little time to get over the feeling of being affronted when a motorcycle comes up behind you on the sidewalk, wanting to pass. We soon learned that the best strategy, the only strategy, is to simply keep moving, smoothly altering your trajectory when absolutely necessary. No one runs into anyone else, no one gets angry, so there’s nothing to worry about. I am permanently over my moral indignation at seeing Vancouver cyclists run stop signs, and it feels great.

As we alternated between picking up Dober-tot poo and trying to get our bearings, we wondered where we were in relation to downtown Seoul. It took a few days, but it finally dawned on us: there IS no “downtown Seoul”. The density is disarmingly consistent in every direction, as far as the eye can see. Seoul is huge, and it’s all downtown. There are areas where you’re more likely to find a department store than an old woman with a basket of cabbages on her head, but there’s no visible evidence of zoning of any kind, and again – it works. Large and small office buildings, shops, houses, markets, and apartment towers all occupy randomly-shaped building lots and share the same unmarked streets. Addresses do exist, but they’re not consecutive and have only a loose bearing on a building’s actual location. Instead, small maps and local landmarks are used to identify specific locations. It seems chaotic to our way of thinking, and it no doubt emerged organically, but it makes for a surprisingly convenient and expandable city. Every single home has most of the shops and services it needs within walking distance. On our walk, we spied a gas pump inside a tiny shop next to a seafood market, and a police station in what looked like a parking lot kiosk surrounded by houses. Modestly brilliant.

In a nutshell, your first impressions of Seoul will completely depend upon your flexibility and your tolerance for what may initially appear to be chaos. In very little time, we’ve gone from accepting it, to liking it, to understanding completely why some westerners who’d planned to stay for a few months are still here several years later. They all say Seoul is crazy, but you have to wonder if that’s exactly what our culture needs.

May 9-11: Camden, Carnaby, Korea

On Saturday morning we became distantly aware of another person moving around in the enormous flat. We eventually found and met Elena the housekeeper, an interesting woman who had been a teacher in her native Romania, but like many Romanians sought a better living in another country. She misses her mother and hopes to return for good some day.

On advice from Amari’s dad, we decided to check out Camden Town for “the vibe”. The clouds were starting to disappear as we stumbled from the tube station into the middle of a fabulously busy / punky / artsy street fair in full swing. There were street vendors selling funky clothes, tons of food stalls, jugglers, stilt walkers, a marching band, a drum circle, hawkers – a broad splash of bright colours and joyful noise. Regent’s Canal, dotted with little patio restaurants, is almost buried in all the activity, or at least until you’re standing on the iron bridge that crosses it. Neon tutus and wildly patterned tights; a man loudly imitating bird calls; T-shirts with Spider Pig, or Darth Vader trimming a topiary Death Star; an excellent busking prog-rock acoustic guitarist sitting on the ground; a handmade sign for “budget combat boots”; bright silk blankets in a dozen different elephant patterns; a former horse hospital converted into a bar (your friends can share a stall) – we loved Camden Town, and would scamper back there in a heartbeat.

Eventually feeling a need to escape the crowds, we made our way to the V&A to see the glass exhibit we had missed on our last visit. It’s an amazing collection of decorative glassware and sculpture covering the entire span of glassmaking history, and displayed with such light and abundance that we felt we were part of the exhibit. We also made a mental note to take a trip to Murano, the glassblower’s island, when we get to Italy next year. Because of the sunny weather (and our penchant for showing up everywhere right at closing time) there were only a few people there, including a young woman who was seated in front of one of the displays and sketching a Bohemian vase. After we were gently turfed out of the V&A, we loped over to Hyde Park and flopped ourselves down on the grass, so as to be more approachable lick-victims to the many passing dogs. We stretched and took some photos of the sky for later conversion into impossible jigsaw puzzles, then made a plan to walk to where some good Indian restaurants were rumoured to be lurking.

Following the horse trail near the edges of the park, we came across the most emotionally moving monument we’d ever seen - a quiet tribute to the millions of animals who have died serving man in warfare. A curved white stone mural depicting an endless line of horses, elephants, camels, and oxen is broken in the middle, where a solemn line of life-sized bronze sculptures – mules, dogs, horses – passes through the wall, all staring silently forward. The only lettering on the memorial is, “They had no choice.” The monument was littered with flowers. Christine and I held one another for a long time, tears running down our cheeks, remembering the selfless love we’ve received from all the animals in our lives.

Making our east from Hyde Park, we passed by the American embassy, encrusted with eagles, stars and stripes, and the Canadian embassy, which stands across the small park separating them, looking like a quaint old hotel where teatime never ends. We passed through an area of smaller high-end clothing stores, and watched some well-dressed Italian looking men loading a fridge through the front door of the Corneliani shop. Hitting Regent Street, we chanced upon the Apple Store, jammed with evening shoppers from all over the world sending emails, Googling restaurants, and doing their personal banking on the hundreds of Mac Books on display. Halleluhia! We got on a machine, transferred some money between accounts (network security not really being an issue for holders of single-digit balances), patronized a cooperative ATM across the street, then zig-zagged around the Carnaby Street area half-looking for Masala Zone, which we’d heard was great. It was touch-and-go, but hunger finally won out over window shopping for shoes, and someone handing out flyers for a nightclub directed us to our restaurant, where we had the best Indian meal we’d ever eaten. Whatever your plans were, go out and have some Indian food tonight. You’ll die happy, a long time from now.

Our Lufthansa flight to Korea (via Frankfurt) turned out to be leaving Heathrow two hours earlier than I had originally thought (dyslexia? what lysdexia?), so we scrambled to pack our things and leave a note for our host, and lugged our suitcases down the street to the very stair-intensive Marble Arch tube station. (A few of the Underground stations are apparently wheelchair-accessible now, which must be a huge relief to those disabled Londoners itching to visit Upney). Our itinerary printout didn’t indicate which of Heathrow’s four terminals was currently hosting Lufthansa, so when Christine spotted an airport information sign across a tube platform our train had briefly stopped at, she ran out of the car, read the sign, and ran back onto the train just as the doors were closing. She’s my hero.

Lufthansa has about five different levels of first class cabin that we budget travellers wade through on our way to the back of the plane. The frontmost cabin features private sleeping space-pods with every imaginable convenience built into them, including drink holders, widescreen TV’s, back massagers, ATM’s, and lighted dancing fountains of Tanqueray. The hop to Frankfurt was comfortably short, and we had what seemed like a generous amount of time to find and board the flight to Seoul. We walked through about 15 kilometers of massively wide, clean, modern and virtually unpopulated corridors to get to our gate area, where we barely had enough time left to buy Europe’s most expensive apple and figure out how to use the pay phones so we could call our moms for Mothers’ Day. We were the last people through the gate and onto the plane, which by the way is a great way to see the smiling faces of all your fellow travellers.

If you ever have a hankering to add some syncopation to your circadian rhythms, a red-eye from Frankfurt to Seoul will do the trick nicely. We did our best to sleep on the plane, but arrived in Seoul on a rainy Monday morning looking and feeling like a couple of zombies. Swine flu being the maladie du jour, we were all made to complete a health questionnaire (“have you had a sore throat in the last six months?”) and have our temperatures taken with those thankfully non-invasive infrared ear-thermometers. We picked up our suitcases, found an ATM, bought a bag of chips, and once again struggled through payphone usage, eventually getting a hold of our friend Brenda. Her instructions: “take a bus to the Hyatt, and I’ll meet you there”. The crazy Korean chapter had begun.